Case study: Oak National Academy’s extraordinary launch and ongoing mission

How Oak National Academy responded to a national crisis and then developed a Theory of Change to continue to deliver amazing impact for teachers.

Sep 05, 2024

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“A kind of Bat Signal went out,” says John Roberts, Director of Product and Engineering for Oak National Academy. “I got a WhatsApp message saying is there any chance you can join a call at 8pm with Downing Street and Google?”

John is recalling the moment that he first got involved with Oak National Academy. It’s 2020. The beginning of the Easter holidays. Covid-19 has closed schools across the UK, leaving pupils, teachers and parents struggling for a way to attend class.

At the time, many schools weren’t using Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams. They didn’t have the technology to easily be able to deliver lessons remotely.

The Government quickly needed some people who could help. And John’s background as a senior school leader turned seasoned EdTech operator made him an ideal person to turn to alongside co-founders Matt Hood and David Thomas.

“It was an initial exploratory conversation,” says John. “What is the art of the possible? How can we get lessons out quickly?”

John has taken time to tell me the extraordinary story of those first two weeks and how Oak National Academy has since evolved from providing that immediate emergency response. This includes digitising the whole curriculum ahead of a second lockdown and creating a service that is still used by around a third of teachers in the UK, saving them valuable time in lesson planning.

Along the way, we’ll explore how they grew their team and continue to empower them to work in an agile way, now as an arm’s length government organisation.

Lockdown one: launch

“We needed to get something out for when pupils were due to go back for the summer term at the end of the Easter holidays,” remembers John.

The team decided to create online lessons following a standard timetable. It might not align perfectly with what schools were delivering but it was good enough for now. There was a core team of around eight. Five more building the platform and about 100 teachers creating content.

“We pulled something together really quickly. About 180 video lessons, and the resources that went with them. Essentially, the first week of a timetable, across multiple subjects, for all age groups from four to 16,” says John.

They picked WordPress as the initial platform: “It's great for building things quickly. It’s very flexible and well-supported. It only gets you so far. But it got us to launch day.”

The WhatsApp message was sent on the 8th of April. Launch day was the 20th of April.

“It was about 4.30am in the morning when we finally got to the point where we thought we were good to go,” recalls John. “I collapsed in a heap after that. I woke up at 6.30am and Nick Robinson was talking about it on the Today program. I checked my phone and I hadn't received a notification to say that the platform had gone down. So I thought, well, I'll try to get some sleep. But it didn't last very long…”

Over 500,000 people visited on the first day. The 21-minute video lessons received good engagement, with a 49% completion rate in the first two weeks after launch.

“Then the realisation sets in that you've launched, you've got over half a million users on the first day, and your content effectively runs out in a week's time,” he grins. “And we didn't really have a mechanism to then get another week's worth of content up…”

The team continued to scramble and bring in more help. “The thing just spiralled and got momentum really, really quickly,” he says.

John considers what he’s learnt from needing to launch a product in such a short space of time. He references Y Combinator’s co-founder Paul Graham’s essay that talks about launching once you have a ‘quantum of utility’.

“You can launch too early and you can launch too late, right? But we didn’t really have a choice about it at this point,” he says.

“We definitely launched earlier than we would have if we were a commercial organisation. I remember sitting on the sofa and seeing Gavin Williamson (The Secretary for Education) announce it, on the podium at Downing Street. I was thinking, this is a month away from being ready. But we’ve got eight hours to get this live. I watched the first five minutes of the briefing and then carried on working to get it live...”

He reflects on this. “I think there is a lesson there. You can launch too early because you can launch something that's broken and it turns users off. But it did work. That was the thing. It was simple to use, and we’d worked hard to make it scalable and secure. We had a working prototype that had a reasonably good product-market fit,” he smiles and pauses. “But that was only going to last so long…”

Summer 2020: rebuild

Building out the track in front of the train got them to the end of the summer term and gave them a chance to catch their breath and work out what to do next. There had been a tentative plan to reopen schools before the summer break but in the end, the Government announced they would reopen in September.

“There was just no way that we could have continued to sustain the work rate of uploading lessons in the way that we were doing it,” says John.

The leadership team considered their options. “I remember us having a conversation and saying, ‘Well, this pandemic isn't going anywhere,’” says John.

“‘Some pupils are going to be ill. We don't know whether there's going to be a future lockdown. And we've got another winter coming up…’ My personal hunch was that there was a high likelihood that we might have another lockdown. And we should have a scenario that meant we were able to handle that.”

Whilst teachers had really appreciated the service and the lessons it offered, they had fed back that the timetable was too rigid. “They might not be teaching Pythagoras on Monday, and the Industrial Revolution on Wednesday. They might be at a different point in their curriculum,” says John.

“So I said, ‘The only way through this is that we build the entire curriculum over the summer holidays. Teachers are off, they're not in school. Can we get all of that content built?”

He recalls the moment. “It was one of those conversations that I thought I’d live to regret as soon as I'd said it. It sounded like a really wild idea. But we were in this situation where we were already having quite wild ideas.”

Matt Hood, the Chief Executive, agreed that this was the right route. “There was a sharp intake of breath from some of the other team members,” John remembers. “They were thinking, ‘Oh, this is a big task’. It was a bigger task than we'd already done.”

Big task though it was, they were all soon onboard and they knuckled down for another busy six weeks. The team expanded again to nearly 1,000 including content contributors from around the UK.

“We brought on a lot of teachers from Multi Academy Trusts who were supporting us up and down the country,” says John. Alongside building out the entire curriculum, they rebuilt the platform in NextJS to enable them to more easily scale and quickly make changes.

On 4th September 2020, as schools reopened, they launched a pupil product and a teacher product. “Teachers could use the content in the classroom and, if pupils were at home, the pupils could access the same content in a slightly different way,” says John. “And that worked. That worked really, really well.”

The second lockdown

Much as the team had foreseen, the second national lockdown came in early January 2021. Pupils were not going back to school. The volume of traffic increased significantly higher than anything they'd previously seen.

At the peak they were delivering content to about 1.1 million daily active users. And about 26 million minutes of video content a day. “That's roughly 50 years of video content being watched every day,” translates John. “Just huge usage.”

“It turned into a red teaming exercise, just to keep monitoring the platform. At 8.30am in the morning, when schools were sending work home and pupils were being put in front of a laptop to start their day, the traffic would rapidly go to 250,000 real-time users on Google Analytics.”

However, their hard work over the summer was paying off. “The hunch to be ready for another lockdown, turned out to be a good hunch to have,” says John. “The decision that we'd made five months earlier and the platform decisions that we made as a result, meant that we actually just scaled with minimal effort.”

From emergency response to long-term value

Schools reopened in March, and by the summer of 2021, most restrictions had been lifted. As the use cases changed and their peak daily users dropped from over 1 million, mainly pupils, to a still respectable 100,000, a mix of teachers and pupils, the team entered a second period of deeper reflection about the future.

“We were grant funded during the pandemic,” explains John, “So we had to think what does this look like long term?” They started to draw up options, believing that there was a desire to keep Oak active, particularly amongst teachers.

He describes this as being like making a difficult second album. “You've had a really great first album, you've got the platinum disc. And now you're wondering what the next one looks like. And it's always harder because you've got the legacy of what's come before.”

In the end, Oak became an arm's length body, a Company Limited by Guarantee owned by the Department for Education. On September 1st, 2022, the code and content were open-sourced and transferred. They were given a budget, a separate board of directors, and a mission to continue, rebuild, and improve the offer for teachers and maintain an online ‘backstop’ for pupils.

“The original content was great,” says John, “But the reality was it was built over a six-week period, in the summer of 2020. We were taking on the assets with a view to rebuilding all of that content and lifting the quality of it as well.”

Oak had a new long-term purpose and the structure to achieve it, so they set about organising themselves for the future.

A team for the long-term

The original core team had been about 20 people. They had now grown to 45 people including operations, external relations, school support, education (content creation and learning design) and three product squads developing and supporting the platform. They set about expanding again.

They found onboarding people into the organisation who hadn't been through the initial crisis and “melee” an interesting challenge.

“Trying to avoid a rift between people that had been there at the early stage and those that joined a maturing arm’s length government body.”

Matt, the CEO, took on a ‘Chief Culture Officer’ role and the team spent time considering the culture and long-term impact they wanted to create.

“We knew that we had to be more robust, and more principled about how we delivered things,” says John. “We wanted to maintain the values of agile and create our own version of that. Not too much structure, not too much process, but that also adhered to what was required by being in the public sector.”

The theory of change

One of the biggest things was being really clear that the organisation's purpose was to create public benefit, not profit maximisation, as is generally the goal of most startups.

To support this, the core guiding document is their Theory of Change. This is reviewed every 12 months and independently assessed by an external team, who evaluate the impact Oak has created on specific outcomes, such as teacher workload reduction and pupil outcomes.

Oak’s purpose is now ‘to improve pupil outcomes and close the gap by supporting teachers to teach and enabling pupils to access a high-quality curriculum.’

The document states how they will do this: ‘We work with schools, teachers and the wider education system to create and support and use world class digital education products built around a regular, rigorous and high quality curriculum.’

Then they defined the different problems they think exist they can have a positive impact on. Things like teacher workload and pupils not always being able to access the lessons they need.

“We've defined the inputs that will work towards addressing some of those problems,” says John. “Then the activities that we do, the outputs from those activities and the outcomes we expect to see.”

“The outcomes are things like increasing the system resilience, increasing teacher expertise, reducing teacher workload and ensuring that pupils have equitable access with minimal disruption.”

Setting objectives

The Theory of Change is focused on the long term with the goal of creating a significant impact. Alongside this, they set-short term objectives to start to “bite it off in chunks”.

“We operate using the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) model and we have done that since pretty much the very start,” says John. “I was really clear that we needed to do this in a non-waterfall, very agile way that gave teams autonomy.”

They evaluate and review their OKRs every school term, aligning the cadence with the academic cycle of the year. “The OKRs actually align to half terms, because nobody likes an OKR period ending on the first of September when schools go back and feel like you've got to deliver at that point,” elaborates John.

“We normally set one or two objectives with three to five key results for each,” he says. “Although we've been through periods of having more objectives because we've just had a broader range of work to do that doesn’t fit neatly into a small number.”

He also adds that it’s important that everyone has input into drafting the OKRs to ensure that everything is captured and that they reflect the organisation's capacity.

“Ultimately, strategy is about focus and priority,” says John. “On the one hand, it's incredibly complicated. But really it's as simple as: are we prioritising the right things and do we have the capacity to hit those priorities?”

Organisation design

To achieve the objectives and make the Theory of Change a reality, they have aligned their organisational design to support their mission-led approach.

“We first started as one big jumble of people working together,” John recalls. “Then we put some formality around two squads: a teacher squad and a pupil squad. And then as we started to scale the organisation we explored different things.”

He expands. “We've tried to slice it by mission. By user type. By product... Where we've now got a bit of a mix and match of different types. I don't think that there is a hard and fast rule for this. You just need to try and avoid stuff falling through the cracks.”

Their current squad structure is:

Pupils, focused on the pupil experience
Teachers, focused on teacher experience
Content, supporting curriculum partners to create and publish content
Curriculum, supporting those teachers who interact with the curriculum design content
AI, exploring how GenAI can be used to help support their Theory of Change

“Each squad has a mission and we try to keep them consistent so the teams get to know what they're working on,” says John. “It has been really effective.”

He adds that democratising access to the technology that supports organising around missions is important to enable this.

“The thing that's been really important is that we now have a code base that anyone in the team can touch,” he says. “We decided not to have silos of ownership over code so that any engineer can work on any feature that’s relevant to them.”

He also observes that the concept of ‘squads’ and the agile process is quite alien to many educators. This is a common challenge in EdTech.

“If you've come from the classroom, your day is incredibly structured. You know you're teaching somewhere between 15 and 25 lessons a week. And you basically know in September, where you're likely to be at 2pm on 5th April the next year. That's the reality of the timetable,” he says.

“Whereas working in an agile squad, it's very different. There's a slight organised chaos to it. You’re trying to keep processes to a minimum and give a lot of autonomy and trust to the teams,” he says.

“We were bringing together people who had a very startup mentality to get Oak out of the door, and then bringing in educationalists and expert teachers who were unfamiliar with that way of working. That culture mix is really interesting.”

Empowering teams

“We started off in a very Kanban-like race,” says John, referring to the methodology designed to keep work moving quickly through the system. “I was directly product managing and then as we grew we started to bring in product managers.”

“Our job now, from a senior team management point of view, is setting the strategy, making sure that we are actually working really robustly, prioritising hard, and finding capacity, or shuffling capacity around if there are bottlenecks. Unblocking problems,” he says. “Also ensuring a good framework for managing the risk. It's about making sure that things are being transparently reported upwards and setting the guardrails.”

He reckons that carefully thinking about risk is the most important thing about empowering teams.

“All organisations going through digital transformation agile can struggle, because the whole thing relies on taking a risk. You need to manage that risk, but it relies on giving a lot of trust and autonomy to people who are, frankly, experts in what they're doing.”

“I can code. But I'm definitely not an engineer in the sense that some of the folks in the team are. We have to trust the quality of those individual contributors to make really good decisions. We don't have all of the contextual information. The key thing is empowering and allowing teams and individual contributors to make decisions at the right level. I would often push senior colleagues, and they each other, as to whether we were operating in the right part of the ‘agile onion’.”

Wherever possible they trust teams and product managers to make decisions and push down decision-making.

One way they manage risk is by providing mechanisms to manage up, such as a Product Steering Group. This includes a wide group of senior stakeholders from the product management, engineering and education teams. Squads are encouraged to take tough challenges and recommendations to this group to make big decisions.

“Maybe there's a big compromise between the pedagogy and the way that we can do something technically,” says John. “The group is a way to make sure that we're making the right decisions and compromises.”

Key to creating this culture of trust and expectation of managing up is creating psychological safety.

“No one likes surprises,” says John. “We work hard to make it safe to have difficult conversations. I make it clear I’m very glad that somebody's come to me and said, ‘I've got this problem and this is what's happened. How do we solve it?’

“There's no point dwelling on it. 99.99% of the time it will not be the biggest problem that we've solved,” he says.

The other important thing about empowering teams, he reckons, is to ensure that you hire good people and then give them feedback. “We expect a lot from good people and they do deliver for us.”

Summary

We reflect on the conversations. What are the things that others could learn from their unique adventure?

You can launch sooner than you think: as soon as you can provide value to your core group of users.
Find time to reflect and document before you scale, otherwise you will end up being top-down or misaligned.
Develop your Theory of Change, that, like a user-centred product vision, clearly outlines the outcomes and impact you want to make in the world.
Break the long-term goal down into clear short-term goals. Do this in collaboration with the team.
Plan on a cadence that aligns with the natural rhythm of what you do. For Oak, this was school terms.
Design your teams around your long-term Theory of Change. This enables them to see how they contribute and get to know their missions.
Push decision-making down to the teams but create the expectations, mechanisms and psychological safety for teams to communicate up.

John reflects on what he believes is the biggest lesson.

“When you're in delivery mode and you're going at 1000 miles an hour trying to get things delivered, you have to find the right time to step back out of firefighting,” he advises. “You need to find time to consider, what is the culture of this organisation? What is our Theory of Change? How are we going to structure our objectives to give our teams autonomy?”

“If you don't do that when you start to scale and bring new team members on, the decision-making will remain at the top. You will crash and burn quite quickly in terms of your ability to make decisions. People either won’t be empowered or won’t know the framework within which they are making decisions.”

He recommends a solution. “Say we're not going to deliver for a day. We're just going to actually document what this looks like. And we're going to think about and reflect on working as a team together. And what does that strategy look like and how do we bring that and scale that as we bring more team members in? And then you've got to keep reflecting on it regularly, alongside reviewing your strategy and objectives.”

This feels like sound universal advice, despite the unique circumstances in which Oak was forged.

“It was probably a bit of a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Hopefully, anyway, from a pandemic point of view!” he laughs. “And I think finally, four years later, I’ve just about caught up with the sleep deficit from those two weeks!”

This case study features in my Building Mission-Led Teams fellowship programme, next cohort 14 October.

Oak National Academy is launching their new AI assistant, Aila today! Next week, we’ll explore how the Oak National Academy is using GenAI to further their theory of change.

Oak National Academy provides openly licensed access to all of their National Curriculum aligned lessons and resources. They are interested in working with other EdTech providers who can see potential in using it, providing feedback that can help them further their mission and theory of change. Oak National Academy’s code is also openly licenced. You can get in touch here. They are also hiring.